


Worst Performance of All Time

by psychosassicvampire (DukeMirage)



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Analysis, Gen, anxious obsessive introspective spiral farah, feels like free therapy to write about them, i so deeply enjoy these characters and their neurotic 'flaws', i'm not sure how much to tag for background characters but he exists, i'm still new to this be gentle, only just the barest hint of him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29603361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DukeMirage/pseuds/psychosassicvampire
Summary: All of the insane nonsense of the past several months felt too stupid and whimsical to even fit into her overview of inadequacies, like they didn’t even count as excuses because thinking about them made her feel… insane. Like if she talked about it, she’d actually be a weird person instead of. Super. And utterly. Normal.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5





	Worst Performance of All Time

**Author's Note:**

> hi, welcome to my second upload! i'm feeling stuck in a multi-chapter wip so i decided to do a writing exercise on our beloved third lead, farah. i realized after i posted my last fic that despite being mentioned, she was hardly there, so i figure she was overdue for some written attention. i'm still woefully inexperienced with plot conception, and character analysis is most of what i do, thus: i present you with this. enjoy.

_If I could just own being a failure, maybe it wouldn’t sting so much…_ She just wanted to get it right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, after all the training, and the studying, and the academy. And the failing... After the failing, and the trying again, and the drilling, it should’ve gotten better. It should’ve gotten better _enough_ . She should’ve reached whatever nebulous _more_ there was. She had been so sure she would get there, because she needed it so much, and then, somehow, it never came together. _Tsk, ‘somehow’_ ... As if it were a mystery at all. It was her fault. Her failure was her own. Always a disappointment _somehow_ , no matter how hard she tried, no matter how well she did, no matter the aced exams or field practice. Nothing, purely, literally, really, actually, fully, truly nothing was going to plan. It crumbled apart so long ago, and then the secondary plans blew away into dust, too. The Spring family was broken apart, Lydia sent away and Patrick... gone.

_And it’s my fault._ Her mind flitted through the deaths she couldn’t stop, wider out to all the utter craziness that’d come to define the past half year, like it might just be her life now. It was even less predictable, more random and chaotic than anything she could possibly prepare for. Situations she could never hope to have control over, that no amount of training could ever dream to touch on. The sadistic and deranged wizard making her shoot her friends kind of took the cake on that one. And that wasn’t even the end of it. All of the insane nonsense of the past several months felt too stupid and whimsical to even fit into her overview of inadequacies, like they didn’t even count as excuses because thinking about them made her feel… insane. Like if she talked about it, she’d actually be a weird person instead of. Super. And utterly. Normal. _This is excessive, though._

It was excessive, and unreal, and yet… they were the circumstances she found herself thrust into. She liked to think that somehow, despite it being her worst performance of all time, (friendly fire! unbelievable!), it still turned out okay-ish. She neutralized the mage, after all. But quick thinking didn’t stop her and her friends from needing weeks in the hospital. And she spent many nights in her sterile cot, haunted by the memory of herself and her friends bloodied and collapsed, lungs full of dry quarry dust and ineffectual adrenaline.

Farah took a deep, shaking breath. She reached into a pocket in the lining of her jacket and took out the badge that Hobbes forced her to keep. _He’ll never know how much that really meant to me…_ Blinking away the blurriness of wet collected on her eyelashes, she turned the metal star over in her fingers. The surreal weight of it in her hands felt like an anchor. She sighed, watched the upside-down reflection of her bedroom window warp as she tilted the chrome this way and that. _Maybe we do get what we deserve eventually. Just... not in the way we expect. It seems life never comes the way we think it would, never truly goes as planned. If I want to seriously prepare for what’s next in store, maybe I need to open my mind up to new possible outcomes. Bigger things. Crazier things._

_If it’s my fault… If it’s what I do… If my choices matter, even if i can’t control everything..._

Her leg bounced for a few beats and then stilled. She pulled out her phone, cleared her throat of whatever phlegm would tattle on her emotional state, and dialed. The ringer sounded once, twice… _It’s good, this is good. It’s good to reach out…_

“Yello, Sherriff Hobbes on the line, may I ask who’s calling?”

_Take control of your life as it is now, not the past you wish you could change._

“Hey, Hobbes. It’s Farah.”

**Author's Note:**

> critique or criticism or thoughts of whatever nature are all highly valued; i'm still newly trying to get accustomed to writing. thank you from the bottom of my heart for your time reading.


End file.
